BREAKING: Green Party membership overtakes UKIP
UPDATE: On Thursday UK Green membership also overtook the Lib Dems, after gaining more than 6,000 members in just two days as we reported here.
In what appears to be the biggest Green Party membership surge since the movement’s inception, Bright Green is proud to be the first to report that membership of the Greens across the UK overtook UKIP’s on Wednesday.
Well over 2000 people joined the party on Wednesday
following anger at the Greens’ exclusion from the TV debates, and coverage of the ‘Green Surge’.
The figures come from the Green Party of England and Wales’ online membership records, which when added to the figures put together by OpenDemocracy’s Adam Ramsay put the Greens’ membership at more than UKIP’s 42,500 for the first time ever.
The cause of the surge appears to be the enormous coverage of the membership figures themselves, which went viral on the Guardian, Independent and Daily Mirror sites on Wednesday. The reporting claimed that Green membership across the UK could overtake UKIP’s within a week – something that has now been far surpassed.
It looks like UK Green membership could overtake even the Liberal Democrats’ over the weekend.
How this will affect the TV debates following Ofcom’s ruling earlier this week is as yet unclear, but Al Jazeera appear to be following the Guardian consortium’s lead in planning TV debates which will include the Greens.
Bright Green will cover developments on Thursday as they emerge.
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2pm update: We hear that GPEW’s membership server is creaking under the strain – fingers crossed it holds up so we can overtake the Lib Dems tonight. In more trivial news, the Green Party shop is rapidly selling out of stock, apparently…
1pm update: The story has now been picked up by the Telegraph, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and the Independent. Of course, we covered it first 😉
Midday update: The Scottish Greens have just passed the 8,000 member mark! And UK-wide we’re on track to overtake the Lib Dems at around 6pm.
11am update: There are now over 43,460 UK Greens, with a current rate growth of about 100-150 an hour (in England and Wales). It’s expected that we will overtake the Lib Dems’ membership by early evening.
10am update: activists were reporting that between midnight and 9:30am, over 300 people joined GPEW, which has now passed 35,000 members. As of 9am there were 43,250 Green Party members across the UK – around 1,250 away from the Liberal Democrats.
If the current rate of membership growth continues, the Greens will overtake the Liberal Democrats membership TODAY.
8:45am update: we’re hearing that the Green Party of England and Wales’ membership system crashed last night due to such high demand.
Your link to join is busted…overloaded…not working.
Hopefully this could lead to more confidence in the Greens, which in turn would mean more members. As soon as people stop seeing the Greens as a one issue pressure group and more like a coherent party which it is the better. Which is why the debates are necessary for Green, with this surge OFCOM will at least have to reconsider it’s verdict.
At the European Elections Ukip received 4,376,635 votes and gained 24 MEPs. The Green Party received
1,255,573 7.87 votes and gained 3 MEPs. Which one is the fringe Party?
At 2000 new members per day, we will overtake the SNP by about Feb 12, the Tories by early March, and Labour by mid April. It’s not all good news, though – we might not keep this growth rate up for long. Even if we do, it will take until the start of the 22nd century before we’ve recruited everybody in the UK, and if we manage to overcome that problem, and we’ll have to wait until about 2140 before we overtake the CPC to become the world’s largest political party.